Cleaners Get A Grip On Tough Hand Grime

A tussle with a car`s engine or the innards of a sink can leave you with grease-coated hands and wishing for the kind of heavy-duty hand cleaner mechanics use.

Some such cleaners use mineral spirits to get rid of grease; they can smell like fuel oil, kerosene or stale paint. Others rely on abrasives like pumice. Yet others take both tacks. Heavy-duty cleaners may also contain emollients to make hands feel better. And all have soap, detergent or both.

Consumer Reports bought a roster of heavy-duty hand cleaners -- pastes, liquids, bars and one powder. After coating test panelists` hands with a concoction of heavy grease, charcoal and powdered clay, the cleaners were put to work. Hand-washers used paper towels to wipe off cleaner plus grime. Some of the cleaners require water; others don`t. If you can rinse, though, the ``waterless`` products are often more effective.

The no-water winners are DL Blue Label (price paid: $1.83), a paste, and DL Trounce Pumice ($2.99), a liquid in a plastic accordion-pump container. Both cleaned well with or without water and come in a 14-ounce size.

The best use-with-water cleaners worked well, but they couldn`t match the top waterless products when they were used with water. Many use-with-water types smelled better, however -- they had no petroleum scent.

Soap up your hands before they get dirty? It seems a bit premature. But that`s the tack taken by Elmer`s Invisible Glove, a cream of soap, glycerin, and silicate that forms a glovelike shield against grease, grime, paint and stain. The product costs about $3.25 for a 3-ounce tube, good for two dozen applications. You coat hands and nails with a generous dab of Invisible Glove, let it dry, and when you`re done working, the directions say, wash gloves plus soil away with soap and water.

The product made panelists` hands remarkably easy to clean. Five of the six hand-washers needed no soap at all -- just water -- to get the grime off.

The product`s biggest drawback is its feel: waxy, dry, gummy, sticky or greasy, according to individual panelists.